3. Scholarly Articles as Sources

You may be the least familiar with using scholarly articles as
sources, and it may take a little practice to differentiate scholarly
articles from other types of articles. Here are several ways to
recognize scholarly articles and some important features of scholarly
articles:

Scholarly articles are found in journals. See the image below
for an example of what the first page of a typical journal article
looks like, including the journal name, article title, authors and where
the authors work.

Scholarly articles are peer-reviewed, what this means is that
the journal's editor sends the article to other researchers to see if
they think the research is okay before the editor agrees to publish the
article.

Scholarly articles contain specific information about original
research the author(s) has done. This means that often scholarly
articles will contain data or results (like in the image below) that you
can use in developing your argument.

Scholarly articles are written for researchers in a particular
field, for example Exercise Physiologists, Child Psychologists, or
Education professionals. This means that scholarly articles assume the
readers understand a lot of the context already and do not always
provide background about specialized terminology or basic theories in
the field. You may need to do extra research to understand some of what
is said in scholarly articles.

You can recognize scholarly articles by some predictable features.
Besides being peer-reviewed, they will also always clearly label the
article title, the journal the article is in, the authors' names and
where they work. Scholarly articles will almost always have an abstract
(see image below)or summary at the beginning and will
always have a list of references (see image below) the authors
cited at the end.

Watch this video to see scholarly sources compared to popular sources: